Breathless Mahoney: Thanks for calling. I was beginning to wonder what a girl had to do to get arrested.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Sick, Sick, Sick

There's no better word than "Sick" for the state of our nation at the hands of George W. Bush and his minions - and how we are ever going to recover, I just don't know. I try not to dwell on it too much, and when that's not possible, I find some solace in laughing about it. But there is no laughing about this. Hilzoy hits one out of the park:

That we are even having a debate about this question, and that it is not a foregone conclusion that someone who claims not to know whether waterboarding is torture cannot possibly be confirmed as Attorney General, is a testament to the moral degradation of our country, and of our political discourse.

And:

Imagine what we would think of a country where candidates for high office and nominees for the highest law enforcement position in the country had earnest debates about whether or not the rack was torture ("hey, I do stretching exercises before I go jogging, and it doesn't hurt me!"), or whether disembowelling living prisoners shocked the conscience ("I had my appendix out, and I'm doing just fine!") We would think that the people who said such things had utterly lost their humanity. Yet for some reason, altogether too many of our fellow citizens seem to think that it is perfectly acceptable for politicians and their appointees to have the same debates about waterboarding. I suspect that future generations, and the current inhabitants of other countries, will regard this the same way we would regard people who took it to be an open question whether the rack was torture: with abhorrence.

So many of our fellow citizens appear to have completely given up on their spines/balls/whatevers that now permit them to live in a "Jack Bauer kick some ass fantasy world" and not realize how it looks from the other side.

Rest of the world, hell.If your neighbor was suddenly screaming paranoid at a perceived threat from the woods across the street, you might agree that there are, indeed, occasionally dark, scary things in there to be wary of. However, you might also inquire if your neighbor took his meds that particular morning.